Ahead of the Prime Minister Harper’s trip to India from November 3 to November 9, a policy brief from the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy has all but dismissed the ongoing trade negotiations as a waste of time.

Written by Eugene Beaulieu, the director of the Calgary School’s International Economics Program, the brief begins by laying out the obvious reasons the Harper government is pursing the agreement: India has the tenth largest GDP in the world; it’s been growing at an average rate of seven per cent-a-year since 1997; it’s a democracy that shares a colonial past with Canada.

“It seems like India has all the right ingredients for Canada to make the CEPA (Canadian Economic Partnership Agreement) a priority,” Beaulieu writes.

But what can Canada really expect from these negotiations?” he asks.

“Unfortunately, not much.”

Part of the problem, Beaulieu argues, is that the existing Canada-India economic relationship isn’t all that strong; India only accounted for 0.6 per cent of Canada’s total exports in 2011.

Of course if that were just because of India’s relatively high 12 per cent average tariff rate and substantial use of non-tariff barriers, completing the CEPA would make sense.

But it more likely “reflects geographic distance and the lack of complementary economic interests,” he writes.

That said, if India were willing to liberalize its services sector and government procurement policies, there could be tremendous opportunities for Canadian companies.

But they don’t want to.

“These are off the table as far as India is concerned,” Beaulieu writes.

“Trade negotiations between Canada and India have been underway for two years now and seem to be going nowhere, fast, with the two countries seemingly on different pages when it comes to their respective goals for the agreement.”

Beaulieu’s observations confirm what others close to the agreement have observed in the last few months.

“So far it certainly doesn’t look as comprehensive as the C in CEPA would indicate,” Jean-Michel Laurin, vice-president of global policy at the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, told iPolitics in June.

As optimistic as the Harper government has been about the agreement – their ambition hasn’t been matched by the Indian side, Beaulieu argues.

India is more focused on some of the 22 other bilateral and regional deals they’re currently negotiating.

“India has a long list of countries it is negotiating trade deals with, and Canada is well down on the list of Indian priorities,” he writes.